Imperial (55 page)

Here’s one from that same year—called, as are so many, “Untitled”; while it’s a far cry from the famous Blackform Paintings of 1960-64, it’s already conspicuously dark within its glowing edges; the sun has almost set over a glinting-wet field; other colors lie hidden in it, under the dark water; we will never get to the bottom of them. When morning comes . . .—but of course morning will never come to the Blackform District of Imperial. In self-defense I turn to another bright painting; its luminescence partakes of what used to be called “false color” in infrared renditions of Mercury or Venus; perhaps somewhere on earth there are fields like this, of mustard and rapeseed sown in with patches of wildflowers here and there, but they’re too strange; they’re too inhuman. Bright, bright! His biographer Breslin feels that these so-called multiforms (namely,
his classic simplified format of two or three stacked rectangles which seem to locate a viewer at a “doorway” between the physical and transcendent worlds
) rarely appear to have
emerged from a torturous creative process. Their warm, intense colors, their fertile variety of shape and hue, their ebullient sense of freedom and creative search
express
infatuation with his medium.
We can look at Imperial that way, too. We can admire the field-colors and field-rectangles of it, noting that the Mexican sweat which waters Imperial cannot affect its beauty one way or another. How intense those colors are! And warm, very certainly, and fertile—where did that fertility come from? What is Imperial? Simply because its patterns are large and strange, does that make them inhuman? If not, then Rothko’s canvases aren’t inhuman, either. They rarely appear to have emerged from a torturous creative process. Not many successes do. The blankness of a late Rothko canvas gets first touched by glue infused with hand-ground pigment, then painted in oil, then glazed, the glazes often containing more pulverized pigments and even whole eggs. His associates remember him as pondering over these unsown fields, sometimes for days. And of all that, nothing’s left except the result. Borrego’s mountains lie unseen behind us now, not to mention the so-called automatist works of the 1940s, which are almost Klee-like. Even the ovals and circles are gone. Inhuman, did I say? The golden rectangle of painting Number 10 (1950) has been called a “humanized sun” because it will not burn the eyes. In 1951 Rothko paints a field of two red lips with wheatgrass growing around them and between their parting; maybe this is Alberta somewhere, not Imperial; but he’s getting closer, I can feel it. I’m getting closer; the airplane lands; the paintings feel bigger and bigger.
To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience . . .
he once said.
However you paint the large picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.
Then come the paintings of yellows and blues: sky-fields and wheat-fields bordering one another on the same page of the County Assessor’s property book, but which county? What if it were Imperial already? What can I learn from these softly blended rectangles of color within their canvas plots? Is this what life is? Is it what Imperial is? Why and how can it make me feel anything?
What were they made of, after all?
marvels one collector.
A monochrome flat ground and a few blobs of color. Larger and smaller rectangular canvases.
And more and more of less and less. The often expressed idea that “Rothko painted a vacuum” holds truth; so does the painter’s own assertion that an artist steadily works toward increasing clarity. But isn’t representation, by being definition, clarity? How can a vacuum stand in for that? And if it can, wouldn’t it follow that everything is the same as nothing? How could Rothko do it? How could he somehow replicate
the emotions present in the orchestral music he so loved?
But he did.
Rothko’s paintings grow beautiful, reaching out to a viewer with their sensuous color . . .
These boundaries between color-sectors in each field, I can’t quite “understand” them, although when I think about a vacant lot in sight of the international fence, something hot and living but fallow in human terms, something altered most peculiarly by delineation, I can almost put my finger on what Rothko is trying to “say.” (He knows the secret of Imperial.) But now, just as I think I might be onto something, his colors begin to become earthier and more muted, the orange descending to tan, the red closer to poppy or even chocolate than it used to be to lipstick; Rothko is going agricultural! We vegetate forever. Do you remember what Judge Farr wrote in 1918?
The sleeper dreams of his rapidly ripening fruit and their early arrival in the markets to catch the top prices ahead of other competitors in less favorable regions.
This is the kind of dream we dream, but without commerce; there’s only fruit, growing imperceptibly within those subplots of color in the Rothko Tract. (Breslin again:
Rothko’s empty canvases are filled with ceaseless movement, a perceptual abundance.
) It’s scarcely a steady progression; here in 1954 I find more blue-and-yellow, more bloody red and urine-yellow, but over time the colors do mute and darken; in the “Saffron” of 1957 I once again see Canadian wheat-plains; in the “Black Stripe” of 1958 I find a reservoir of real darkness; it’s night on the Salton Sea, and this pool perhaps contains the
aguas negras
of the New River. That same year, Rothko paints “Four Darks in Red.” Sunset bleeds upon the irrigated zones of a dark wet field. It’s so mysterious; it is saying something to me, maybe something about Rothko’s suicide; I want to “understand” it but cannot. If I write a book about Imperial, will I comprehend it? If not, what did I do wrong? About the boundaries between his sub-zones of color I wrote
softly blended.
Imperial as seen from the air remains a chessboard of almost shockingly distinct agricultural squares. But wait until you’ve seen a hundred-and-nineteen-degree day at Bombay Beach, where sky and sea ooze together, the horizon erased by haze. You’ve fallen into a Rothko canvas then. Or when you descend west to east, coming from the high desert near Tecate into a hazier softer brownish-greenness of Mexicali’s fields, you sink into heat and haze. Call it Rothko. “White and Black on Wine” (1959) is another field in another sunset; soon it will be dark and then too late forever; the sky is white like a new white car between the date palms at sunset—but here in Rothko County, local ordinances prohibit the beards and wickerwork skins of the palm trees; there’s a law against the Mexicali I love, whose walls are painted with fishes, shrimps, and
femme fatale
octopi on the facades of seafood restaurants. Are these losses a loss?
⁸⁵
Certainly, but no matter how much I want to see and “understand” all within Imperial, I can’t help the fact that details drain away in that sweet summer darkness when Judge Farr lies down to sleep; he thinks that he’ll get up tomorrow but it’s already 1918, the date of his apoplexy; last week in El Centro I purchased a copy of his death certificate. And we’re all going down there, deep into the rich silt soil of past seas; our ocean must run dry; the sun fails; we thought we hated the sun because it sweltered us but it helped us rush our fruit to market. Softening sunlight makes the desert green; the western edge of Imperial glows pale with Plaster City’s sparse white structures in the distance; Rothko paints squares of paleness; I believe he owns
likeness
because east of Ocotillo a zone of flat white sand runs all the way to Westmorland.
The sleeper dreams of his rapidly ripening fruit.
He dreams and dreams forever. By the time of the Harvard Murals of 1961-62 we find Rothko planting a lot of grey and maroon in his homestead;
we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
In either 1961 or 1964 he paints “Untitled (Light Plum and Black)”; to me it seems to be bursting with darkness and grief, but maybe he was happy and I am imagining all this. Here’s “Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown).” Imperial’s silt is sown but not yet harvested; the dark water feeds it. And then that fuzzy-edged bloody rectangle in an indigo-greyness (number 207, painted in 1961), what does that remind me of? I used to think that red was too “unrealistic,” but that was before I saw the Salton Sea in those flooded lots beyond the levee at Bombay Beach. I
know
that the Salton Sea can be red like that; it can also be reddish-green; tea-green; greenish-brown; and as for Rothko’s strange blue, I remember what I saw at that restricted geothermal plant near Cerro Prieto south of Mexicali; that canal or drain or whatever it was, a source of the New River, was an impossibly glowing blue! In Imperial anything’s possible. You think that only dullish tans and beiges flourish in that place, but what about the yellow-green spray of palo verde bushes west of Brawley? More blue in this next painting—well, here comes a line of blue beyond the orchards: the Salton Sea. (The sign says
FIRE DEPARTMENT VOLUNTEERS WANTED
.) I give in; Rothko can paint Imperial any color he likes. What then
is
Imperial? It may be something richer, literally more fruitful than I can ever devour. Can two or three rectangles of oil paint likewise add up to Imperial? And if so, is that the result of Rothko’s genius, or of the obvious fact (not that it used to be obvious to me) that everything is inconceivably grand? What is Imperial? (What is New Inspiration Point? Did Ansel Adams “understand” it?) Imperial is “Untitled.” Back in the days when the conquistadors claimed it without knowing it, and in the centuries when bread was light, Imperial was untitled; now what is it? Sector El Centro. I give in. I study a Rothko canvas, and its deliberate labor helps me see beauty; as a result, I see more beauty in Imperial, too. Rothko can paint Imperial any way he likes (except the last way, the way of the Houston Chapel, which achieves his stated goal of being
something you don’t want to look at.
) Oh, but Rothko’s giving in, too; he paints red on red and black on black, shutting down his tonal scale; for instance, “Number 8,” painted in 1964, could be a representationalist painter’s primed and black-gessoed board without any image. Rothko calls it finished. The representationalist for his part will paint subtractively, just as time does. (Do you want to know what’s left when a painter takes blackness away? Imperial! Imperial’s subsectors of earth are nearly as white as salt.) Rothko’s mother dies in 1948, when the colored multiforms commence. In 1957 he begins to take away everything but blackness. His name for this project of reduction: “the dark pictures.” Staring into a Rothko image, I discern a darker black rectangle within the other black rectangle, and within the darkest black may dwell prior hints and rustlings of night. “Untitled,” “Untitled” and “Untitled.” Black and grey, grey and white, slate-blue (I remember driving westward on Highway 8, with the pale blue mountains beyond Imperial floating above a snowy haze); nothing is or can be distinct; we’ve almost come to that chapel in Houston where, in one admirer’s words,
all that remains of Rothko’s once rich colors is a deep darkness from which everything . . . slowly emerges.

Chapter 47

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1781-1920)

They had all kinds of picturesque names for highways [in southern
California] . . . Also, there were Spanish names, reverently cherished by the
pious realtors of the country.

—Upton Sinclair, 1927

1

The Head or Father of each family must be a Man of the Soil. . .
He stood staunch as Mount Signal.
The women had each two undergarments a year, a gown and a blanket.
Tell the girls that this is the best place for marrying they ever saw.
I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

It was altogether one of the most miserable countries in the world.
It is a miserable place, without pasture and with very bad water.
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA.

WATER IS HERE
.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.

I can’t help believing in people . . .
The Indians do all the hard work.
I found about 150 Indians beside the women, who fled upon my arrival.
Soon the endemic flora will have been displaced largely by these foreigners
. It is predicted by the railroad companies, that this influx will continue.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS.

2

There is plenty of good land to be had but all Government land worth taking is about gone.
As this is nearly all desert we have not included it.

The wonderfully fertile valley of the New River in the eastern part of the county is now being opened up . . .
Rothko’s empty canvases are filled with ceaseless movement, a perceptual abundance.
Green was becoming abundant, and the whole area was dotted with the homes of hopeful, industrious, devoted persons.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
He has even spread his enterprises over the international boundary into Mexico.

3

I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
It would be so convenient to carry on a farm . . . when all the hard and dirty work is performed by apprentices.
WATER IS HERE
.
Every house had its inclosure of vineyard, which resembled a miniature orchard.
A brick building or two bear mute witness to the fact that Dixieland still awaits the coming of water on a higher level.
WATER IS HERE
.

PART THREE

REVISIONS